Posts Tagged ‘Opinion’

If you know me in Second Life or have followed this blog at all, you’re likely to know that I’m prone to periods of reflection. I’ve been nosing around one of these reflective times for a little while now; asking myself “what do I want from my Second Life?” What has come of this latest round of thinkiness you ask? I haven’t come up with good answers yet, but I have found myself asking “why am I here?” If I’m being brutally honest when I answer that, I would say that I’ve been a little like I’m Doctor Dolittle’s fabulous pushmi-pullyu in Second Life. On the one hand, I’ve found myself affirmatively exploring all that Second Life has to offer; drawn like a moth to a flame by the creativity, people and potential of Second Life (and don’t get me started on the concept of the potential of SL at the moment, I might get ranty. Perhaps a blog post on that will follow.) Yet on the other hand, part of my Second Life has been about avoidance of some complicated first life issues; the sort where this is not really a right or wrong answer, but likely to have some different sorts of ache no matter the direction (and if you *really* want to know all of the details of this, go ahead and ask; I’ll share them conversationally.) So I am in SL for multiple reasons, some good, some less good; I’ve flipped back and forth between the two several times, but am not really certain if I could articulate how or why it has changed for me.

Leaping from the personal to the general, I’ve noticed that the same is often true for others in Second Life. In one camp are the people being pulled into Second Life; drawn to the fun and creativity of a virtual world. The other camp are people being pushed; taking to the comfort of a digital life as a distraction. Of course, like all generalizations, these distinctions can be fluid; one is not inherently better than the other, but certainly lines can be crossed into negative behavior and your mileage may vary. So the question is this, dear reader, what is it for you? Do you feel pushed or pulled into your digital life?

I thought it only fair to take up the challenge I put forward in my last rambly post. Among other things, I asked if it was possible to describe the value of a virtual world to the uninitiated. There were really some great responses to the questions, both in comments and in posts on their own blogs. So, to be fair, I thought I would tilt at windmills and attempt a description of the value of Second Life to the unitiatied. Here’s my brief try:

Virtual worlds offer an ability to interact with that allow for a projection of self while having a sense of place. Within these worlds, a person can find community, interact within a three-dimensional context and have an unparalled opportunity for expression. What one chooses to do – and how they choose to do it – is entirely up to them.

Okay, so I’m going to completely honest and tell you that I don’t love my description. Writing a pithy description of the value of a virtual world is a challenging prospect; there is so much that simply cannot be captured by mere words. Like a number of the commenters on the original post, I don’t believe that it is possible to describe the magic of Second Life to the unitiatied. Yet. One needs to experience it to more fully get a sense of what it means. We’re still in a period where the idea of a virtual world either resonates instantly or it doesn’t. I’m sure we could have some very long discussions as to why this is, but I think there are multiple factors. The first is the shortcomings of technology; we’re simply not yet at a place where it can look and feel viscerally real. The second are the shortcomings of Second Life (and to be fair, let’s say all of the current nongame virtual worlds); the interface isn’t terribly intuitive and operational issues can magnify the shortcomings of technology. Finally – and perhaps most important – is the “you say tomaTOE, I say toMAHtoe” factor; let’s face it, people all enjoy different things and the use of SL is a choice (perhaps with the exception of some business and education applications). Just because Second Life gets my synapses firing and I find it very enjoyable, doesn’t mean that is true for everyone. (Take my sister, for example. I once tried getting her engaged in SL and she just plain did not like it and would rather spend her time in other ways.)

I also asked if Second Life has a broader purpose that appeals to the masses or was something that resonated with a smaller section of society. As I’ve thought about that question, I haven’t strayed very far from what I wrote in My Tammy Faye Bakker Moment post last June. In it, I wrote that “I’ve grown to believe that the best uses of Second Life are the ones that strive to take advantage of the ability to do things that would be prohibitive or not possible to do in real life. ” I still believe this to be true, but with a couple additions and caveats. The first is that I would also add that it’s really okay to simply have fun in a virtual world. The other is that the applications and usages will likely evolve over time and become more resonant with people in general.

Easy, right? I still would love to hear more people make an attempt at a definition; the more we can articulate what we value and what we want, the greater the chance we’ll be able to help others see our vision as well. We’re at this funny moment in time where language doesn’t entirely capture the experience and that there are gaps in experience that can’t be covered with language. Maybe we should all try tilting at windmills a little more to try to fill that gap.

One of my biggest sins in either life is that I’m pretty much thinking about one thing or another. Churn, churn, churning about this or that. There are myriad reason why I do it, of course. Part of it has to do with how I’m wired, but there is also part of it where I yearn to understand things that aren’t making sense to me. The good and bad thing about Second Life for someone like me is that there is so much that doesn’t make immediate sense. While Linden Lab has often been nonsensical in some of its actions in the past couple of years, I couldn’t escape the intuitive sense that there was some huge disconnect occurring but I was having a hard time wrapping it into a pretty package that made sense to me. Between the fodder from Philip Rosedale’s recent town hall meeting and the SL blogosphere, my brain has been churning overtime and just maybe I’m starting to get an idea of that missing piece that I haven’t been able to put my finger on the past months. So what is it, Lanna? What seems to be Second Life’s missing link? Read on after the jump to find out..

No, this post isn’t an homage to that musical supergroup Three Times One Minus One, but about how we keep our first and second lives together. People come and go from Second Life all the time; it is simply the way things go in a pseudonymous virtual world. (Which I blogged about before here.) To be sure, the reasons people leave are many. Things get too busy in their first life. They get bored of their second life. The list of reasons goes on and on and on. Yet despite what people cite as a specific reason, I have noticed one theme among a group of departures upon which I can make a generalization. There are exceptions, of course, and it doesn’t cover all people leaving SL but it does address a large group of departures. Here’s the general trend that I’ve noticed:

“The lifespan of an avatar is inversely proportionate to the distance one keeps from their first life.”

Or, more simply put, the more people have to work to keep their first and second lives separate, the shorter their second life. No, I’m not talking about people who don’t divulge their first life name, because that is probably 90% of SL Residents. I’m talking more about the avatars who avoid acknowledging that they even have a first life. If you’ve been around SL, I’m sure you’ve met the type; these are people that avoid sharing they had awful day at work for fear that someone might ask them what they do. This is more about being so cautious that the person refuses to share contextual information as friendships develop. Half the people in SL have something to the effect of “SL is SL and RL is RL” in their profiles, but I would venture to guess that the majority of them share some of their RL with people they’ve grown to trust.

But this doesn’t just apply to keeping your first life secret in your second, but also applies to people hiding their second life from their first. I tend to think that this is actually a larger group. This is the people keeping their entire experience in Second Life secret from their spouse or partner. Working hard to keep things hidden requires effort and psychic energy that eventually takes its toll. Or, as one friend who left put it, “I just couldn’t keep lying all the time.”

Let’s be clear, I’m not judging here; at various points in my Second Life experiences, I’ve worked hard to keep them both separate. While Second Life allows us to explore boundaries, create and do things that we might not be able to do in the atomic world, we really only have one life to live. More accurately, I think it is often a process of realization that to maintain it all, one must find ways to be comfortable integrating all of these experiences together or risk burning out.

I would love to hear your two cents on this. Do you feel you had to find a way to integrate all these aspects of your life? Or, for those of you who work to keep them apart, has it felt challenging to do so as time passes?

I have a love/hate relationship with web-based social networking. This may sound funny coming from a regular Second Life user, but it’s true. The thing for me with social networking on the web is that I’m just young enough to see the potential and utility of it but also just old enough to eye it with a bit of skepticism (and I’ll leave it to you to guess my age, tyvm!). Of course, SL provided just the right amount of social interaction for me for quite some time. Then a friend talked me into getting a Facebook account to play the now-defunct Scrabulous. Then, of course, I got a Twitter account. Finally, Plurk rolled around and I got hooked. Where I’ve been active has often been an outgrowth of my second life and used as an opportunity to connect with friends I’ve made in-world. I found that being involved with these sites stretched my horizons and let me meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise; in short, I met some of my closest online friends through web-based social networking. And for a variety of reasons, I’ve mostly been taking a break from being active in my social media spaces.

Despite being mostly silent on my social networks these days, I do peek in on my accounts from time to time. But there were two interesting things I noticed in the past week that got me thinking about web-based social networking again. One was that even though it has been around for a while, all of the sudden everyone on Plurk was talking about the importance of claiming your name over on Avatars United. So, like a lemming, I decided to go and do the same thing. Then, someone else pasted a link to a blog about banning Fake Facebook Profiles, or, what appears should be named “Let’s ban Second Life avatars from Facebook.” But just what did you find interesting about these sites, Lanna? In one word: friends.

One of the things that I have found fascinating are the different approaches people take to adding friends on these sites; some take the word literally, while others appear to view it as a synonym for contact. At some point I will post about friending in Second Life, because I take a very different approach there. But for now, let’s talk about friending on web-based social networks. So I’ve been asking myself one simple question: Just whom do you call friend, friend? Read on after the jump to find out…

Experiential education has ruined me. Well, not ruined, but it absolutely has ingrained in me the need to reflect on every experience. Some time ago, I worked to provide outdoor experiential education for young people (kinda like Outward Bound). We would challenge them with activities and then ask them to reflect personally and as a group on those experiences. It really can be a powerful way to deepen your learning. My problem is that it has generally resulted in me reflecting on most every experience I have; this is usually a fantastic thing and I still training myself to recognize those times when things don’t need reflection. Generally speaking, I find myself thinking about things that have happened and trying to find ways to learn and grow from them and my second life is no different.

Maybe it is due to the fact that my first life birthday just passed and my Second Life rez-day is coming up, but I’ve been in a very reflective mood lately. It is hard to say what got me thinking about rights and responsibilities in Second Life, but I have been. I know that I have a tendency to be philosophical and navel gaze about the differences of Second Life and when it comes down to it, things are generally the same in both worlds with the exception of constant pseudonymity and creativity. As we move through our Second Lives, we undoubtedly have the right to be pseudonymous, but with those rights comes responsibilities. So the question for me has been, how do we maintain ourselves in a world where there are different approaches to the rights and responsibilities of pseudonymity? The more I thought about this, the more I thought the words that Sitearm Madonna has in her profile ring true; she’s got a simple, yet wonderful ruleset for SL:

This is an illusion;

Trust every one and no one;

Have fun anyway!; and

By your actions you shall be known. 🙂

Pretty great, isn’t it? The more I think about it, the more I think she’s articulated a wonderful way to be in SL. Implicit in it are three important things, one is that we are responsible for ourselves, we can choose how we percieve and interact with others and we can’t forget the golden rule. With a bunch of reflection and the right timing, I’ve been trying hard to copy Sitearm’s sage advice. So how about you, dear readers, do you have a ruleset that works for you in SL that you would like to share?

Just what does community mean in Second Life? Yes, I know we’re nearing the start of the Second Life Community Convention (and no, you won’t see me there), but sometimes it seems to me that Second Life has the community feel of, oh, the Balkans maybe? I’m being flip by comparing it to the Balkans, but for the most part community in Second Life feels like bunches of small groups that maybe – just maybe – overlap with one another. But more than just being a world that seems to embrace community in micro-groups, the concepts of community feels fragile and cliquey in Second Life.